HomePod - it’s a thing now

My issue is that when I tried a similar setup using an Gen 2 ATV, AirPlay was completely unusable. It was an unmitigated disaster, /not/ working far more often than it worked. I gave up and went to a single crummy Bluetooth speaker while I wait (and wait... and wait...) for AP2. But I'm a broken record at this point. I'll quietly follow the 11.4 beta news and hope that it makes it to prime time.

I know that shitty wifi routers are a common root cause with a lot of Airplay issues. Airplay has been rock solid at my house, and it gets used heavily in a Mac-to-many setup from my office (basement, living room, library, and playing directly in the office) with control via the Remote app on my phone. Nothing is hard wired in aside from the AirPort Extreme to the ONT via ethernet.

My issue is that when I tried a similar setup using an Gen 2 ATV, AirPlay was completely unusable. It was an unmitigated disaster, /not/ working far more often than it worked. I gave up and went to a single crummy Bluetooth speaker while I wait (and wait... and wait...) for AP2. But I'm a broken record at this point. I'll quietly follow the 11.4 beta news and hope that it makes it to prime time.

I know that shitty wifi routers are a common root cause with a lot of Airplay issues. Airplay has been rock solid at my house, and it gets used heavily in a Mac-to-many setup from my office (basement, living room, library, and playing directly in the office) with control via the Remote app on my phone. Nothing is hard wired in aside from the AirPort Extreme to the ONT via ethernet.

I absolutely grant that could have been a contributing factor, but during that time none of the other WiFi devices in my house had the same kinds of issues. The ATV in question would routinely just disappear from lists of available devices, only to be fixed by a hard reboot of the device; once connected it would often buffer to no end and then just stop altogether. They basically acknowledged all these shortcomings in their WWDC17 talk about AP2 so I know I'm not completely crazy.

FWIW my AirPlay receiver is a Raspberry Pi with a DAC HAT and running ShairPort Sync that's connected to my stereo in the lounge room and it's been absolutely rock solid. Prior to that I would use our old ATV2 and didn't have any issues there either.

I don’t have a problem with the price, but I do have a problem with the lack of ANY other inputs besides of airplay. I am not necessarily asking for jacks, but the lack of bluetooth is ridiculous.

Bluetooth simply isn't capable of producing the same sound quality as Airplay. Using Bluetooth instead of Airplay is like hooking up a cable box to your HDTV over coaxial cables instead of HDMI. You can do it ... but why would you want to? The only downside for no Bluetooth support on the HomePod is guests you have over who use Android phones can't play music on the speaker. And for me personally, that's such an infrequent use case that it's more of a "nuisance" than anything.

(I paused for a moment and considered it should be "Cost > Convenience > Quality," but consumers seem ultimately willing to flip those two often enough that I think convenience—for various definitions of that word—was the most important metric.)

Sure, but Jago claimed that Bluetooth is capable of delivering the same quality as AirPlay which would require BT to support some form of lossless audio transport which it to my knowledge doesn't. The closest is aptX HD which is marketed as lossless but actually isn't, and LDAC which is also lossy. Is there an actual lossless BT audio protocol that I'm not aware of?

Does it matter? If you're streaming audio you've already chosen convenience over quality per my equation above. Just because AirPlay sounds marginally better (and both sound worse than, say, a CD) is not some justification for Apple to exclude Bluetooth pairing. The unspoken justification is that the HomePod is designed to be part of an entirely closed system. It is not general purpose, it is fixed purpose, fixed environment. Which is not a bad thing in and of itself, but it does potentially contribute to limiting the HomePod's appeal.

AirPlay is lossless streamed; you can get CD equivalent through it. And it requires no pairing, which is a significant downside to bluetooth. And works across the entire wifi range of the network, and allows for multi-point playback with AP2. Bluetooth is better suited for away from wifi, 1:1 connections. Airplay is far more appropriate for in-wifi, many:1 situations. It does limit the appeal for non-Apple households, but I don't think Apple really cares about those. The Apple ecosystem is definitely large enough to support an in-ecosystem product, and since Apple typically captures the upper end of the market anyway, I'm not sure how many additional units would be sold with the addition of bluetooth connectivity.

Jago may be wrong about the specifics, but does that matter? Is that a functional justification for the HomePod not to support Bluetooth pairing? Ultimately, that's a rhetorical question. The HomePod doesn't support Bluetooth pairing because it was not designed as a general-purpose device, it was designed as a specific part of a specific music consumption "workflow," as envisioned by Apple, with few exceptions.

That by nature limits both its appeal and reach, so I don't know that it's so surprising to hear rumors that it may not be selling well. As a reaction to that news, some of us are sharing some of our reasons for not seriously considering the HomePod. I don't know that Bluetooth pairing ranks particularly high on my list of wants for a freestanding streaming speaker, but it does speak to the Convenience > Quality > Cost equation as I envision it. Features missing from competing devices detracts from convenience and diminishes my interest in the device.

EDIT: ant1pathy, my apologies, you caught me in a stealth edit. I realized I had my facts wrong about AirPlay, but wanted to salvage my overarching point, deciding to delete and re-start my message after re-writing it. Sorry about that. Ultimately, we're kinda making the same point, albeit from different angles.

No worries, I figured it was something like that. I'd be happy to edit mine to better reflect the point you were making, if you'd like.

I'm really ambivalent about the desire for bluetooth pairing. It's a distinctly unpleasant experience once you've become used to Airplay. Having to put the device in pairing mode, go find it on the list, wait for it to connect, and swap out for another person if they want to play. Hosting parties at my house, it is so much easier and more convenient to tell people to just target "Living Room" on Airplay. Multiple people can hop in whenever they want, without having to go through the pairing dance. I have a nice bluetooth portable speaker, but that's uni-paired to my phone. My gf has one as well, and we used to bounce it between us, and that was a serious pain in the ass, so I just bequeathed that one to her permanently and got a separate one for myself.

It would appear newer iOS devices don't have to be on the same Wifi (or ethernet) network in order to Airplay audio to an Apple TV, HomePod, or any other Airplay-enabled device. I certainly wasn't aware of this myself.

I bought four of these things over the past week (started with one, then added three more once I was sure I was going to like it). My experience has been exclusively Airplay 2, so I missed out on any AP1-specific issues.

So far, both my wife and I very much enjoy the experience. We're heavily in the apple ecosystem, including music and home automation, and have zero ties to non-apple streaming services, so the homepod concept has been a pretty good fit for us. Sound quality seems fine, though I'm getting much more use out of the things as audiobook + podcast players. Multi-room audio so far is working flawlessly, and it's cool to be able to command an audiobook to follow me throughout the house as I'm doing stuff.

We also had a bunch of folks over last weekend and the linked network of homepods was great for background music and for people to queue up their own music—or at least for the people with iphones. The folks with android devices were understandably less than impressed.

The homepod in my office gets the most workout, and it's cool watching all my apple devices light up when I say "hey siri..." and then they quickly figure out who's supposed to be servicing the request. Haven't had any issues with "siri arbitration" so far, and it's working well. The homepod seems to answer most queries, but there's some user-controllable logic built in and if you want a specific device to respond, you can just touch that device first and that seems to be enough to make it tell the others to back down.

The lack of real multi-user support is somewhat annoying, but it hasn't proven hugely detrimental. My workaround so far has only been to enable personal requests + music recommendation feedback on the office homepod, and leave those things deactivated on the others. Since I'm going to almost always be the only person talking to the office pod, that seems to handle most of the potential problems with keeping other peoples' chocolate out of my apple music recommendation peanut butter.

Other than cost, I have no real complaints. None of the caveats about the homepod apply to me since i'm so thoroughly buried in Apple Land, and at least so far, I'm pretty damn happy with my purchases. (And before anyone gigs me for spending too much, it was my 40th birthday and I'm allowed!)

so I have 2 home pods in a stereo configuration. Even when I'm sitting close to HP #1, HP #2 answers any Siri requests. Is it possible I have something set incorrectly or is that how a stereo pair works?

so I have 2 home pods in a stereo configuration. Even when I'm sitting close to HP #1, HP #2 answers any Siri requests. Is it possible I have something set incorrectly or is that how a stereo pair works?

Based on some quick googling, it appears that the homepod that you created the stereo pair from will always answer "hey siri" requests no matter what. If you want to change this, you have to unlink them and re-create the link from the other one.

so I have 2 home pods in a stereo configuration. Even when I'm sitting close to HP #1, HP #2 answers any Siri requests. Is it possible I have something set incorrectly or is that how a stereo pair works?

Based on some quick googling, it appears that the homepod that you created the stereo pair from will always answer "hey siri" requests no matter what. If you want to change this, you have to unlink them and re-create the link from the other one.

My understanding is that it uses the one you last physically interacted with as the primary in the stereo pair. So if you want to change which one answers, manually invoke siri on it and it will become the primary.